


The Miracle Seven

by UnrememberedSkies



Series: Whumptober 2019 Fills [4]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Brief mention of cruelty to animals and children, Everyone Needs A Hug, Gags, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Imprisonment, Isolation, POV Outsider, People As Test Subjects, Self-Harm, Suicide Attempt, Unethical Experimentation, Whumptober 2019, hoo boy, how do I tag this?, straitjackets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-27 02:33:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20940848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnrememberedSkies/pseuds/UnrememberedSkies
Summary: He mostly saw them through the CCTV cameras installed in their cells. He had never spoken to them. He wasn’t sure anyone had really spoken to them properly, as people instead of test subjects. But watching them, every night, all night, he felt like he knew them, just a little.In another universe, it is not Reginald who gets his hands on the kids, but a secret research facility. The would-be Hargreeves grow up in total isolation, their only human contact the scientists that test and push their abilities to the limit. A security guard watches them through the CCTV cameras in their cells, and sees the humanity in these powerful, damaged creatures.





	The Miracle Seven

**Author's Note:**

> So my brain is made of pure pain at the moment and I'm dosed up on painkillers, so I'm not sure how much sense this makes, but here is my humble offering for the [Whumptober 2019](https://whumptober2019.tumblr.com) prompt 'Isolation'. Please read the warnings, and if I've missed something, please let me know. Enjoy my attempt at whumping all the Hargreeves kids at the same time!

Frank Newman remembered the day the so-called Miracle 43 had been born. There had been worldwide media interest. Every newspaper carried headlines of ‘scientific mysteries’ or ‘immaculate conceptions’ depending on their persuasion; every talk show debated the implications from every perspective imaginable. 

Then there was nothing. Radio silence.

It was like the whole world collectively forgot. Sure, there were vague mentions in private conversations. Frank remembered bringing it up when he and his friends were making their way through a case of beer in a deserted parking lot, and they had contemplated it drunkenly for a few minutes before getting distracted by a different topic.

All evidence had been erased from the public conversation. No recordings of those talk shows or copies of those newspapers were ever seen again.

Frank, like everyone else, had forgotten about the Miracle 43.

Then, fifteen years ago, fresh out of the army and looking for a place to belong, Frank had been offered a security job at some research facility up-state, and those miracle children had reappeared in his life.

No one had said as much, of course. Secrecy shrouded the whole thing and he and the other security guys weren’t allowed to discuss what they saw in the labs. But Frank was a smart guy, it was why he’d been recruited. He’d joined the dots between the powerful, sad-eyed children locked up in those windowless white cells and the forty-three babies that appeared from nowhere on October 1st 1989.

Their numbers were a bit depleted, of course. The Miracle 43 were now the Miracle 7. Frank didn’t know what had happened to the other thirty-six, wasn’t sure he wanted to know. From what he’d seen of the surviving seven, he’d bet it was nothing good.

He mostly saw them through the CCTV cameras installed in their cells. He had never spoken to them. He wasn’t sure anyone had really spoken to them properly, as people instead of test subjects. But watching them, every night, all night, he felt like he knew them, just a little.

Test Subject One, for all his size and strength, was the most docile of the bunch. Frank had seen his obedience during the tests of strength and durability the lab coats put him through. He didn’t fight, was generally genial with the lab coats and their assistants. When Frank had first seen him, he’d written him off as big muscles and not much between the ears.

One’s accommodating nature had granted him a little leniency from his jailors. When Frank had seen the big man sat on his bed, hunched over his lap one night, his first instinct had been to look away. It was only on closer inspection, though, that he realised One was scribbling furiously in a notebook. He watched as every night, One filled pages and pages with writing. It was only when he’d filled the notebook that he would stop, and flick through the notepad, and smile, like he was reading letters from a sweetheart. 

Every morning, those notepads full of mystery words were taken away, and replaced with fresh blank ones. Frank wondered what was inside them, thought maybe One was actually a genius, and the notebooks were filled with philosophy or the secrets of the universe. He found out the truth through one of the other security guys, who told their whole lunch table, through cruel snickers, that the big oaf was writing poetry.

Frank didn’t find it funny. He only wondered what a man who only ever saw a plain white cell and the physical endurance laboratory wrote poetry about.

Test Subject Two was sharper, in more ways than one. Frank had seen the man throw projectile after projectile with inhuman accuracy, and he was allegedly just as effective with a gun. Frank’s military mind couldn’t help but feel that he was wasted here. The military would snap this guy up; he could do some real damage. 

Once, Frank and the other security guys had been allowed to see him in action, as Two threw knives at mechanical and computer-generated targets for their viewing pleasure. He should have known the lab coats wouldn’t be satisfied with that alone. The thing about aiming a weapon, whether it was a gun, knife, or axe, was that it became much harder when aiming at a living thing. Emotions came into play, even if you had no personal connection to the target.

Frank had thought that growing up in isolation and being deprived of any human connection would make Two the perfect killing machine. He was proved wrong the day Two spent twelve long hours behind closed doors with the lab coats. The day everyone else tried hard to ignore the sounds coming from within: the frightened bleating of animals, and – although no one could ever prove it – the high-pitched voices of children.

Two was deposited back in his cell that night. He would normally prowl around his small space like a caged tiger, looking up at the CCTV cameras with a sneer on his face. This time, he walked into his cell with his head hanging. He stood motionless as the door closed behind him. He was so still, Frank thought his screen had frozen.

Then, Two had collapsed into the corner of the room, brought his knees to his chest. He wept, his shoulders shaking and mouth open and gasping with the force of his sobs. He cried until the tears ran dry, and then his face twisted in silent agony. When he looked up at the CCTV camera, the man seemed to look directly at him, and Frank felt himself shrink back under the raw emotion in those dark eyes.

The lab coats feared Test Subject Three the most. Strength and weapons, they could take precautions against. They’d developed serums and sedatives that could be administered if the others tried to turn their power against them. But the lab coats valued their minds above everything else, and this woman could shape those minds to her will.

He wondered how she was tested, because everyone was so afraid to listen to her, to hear her speak. He thought maybe she was the loneliest, unable to communicate with anybody, except under the strictest, most regulated conditions.

Every night and every day, she was trussed up in a painful-looking metal gag. It covered her mouth and wrapped around the sides of her head, locking her jaw in place. More than once, Frank had seen blood dripping from beneath the metal, so he could only imagine what horrific tongue-depressing mechanism was hiding beneath the exterior, digging into her flesh. All because some lab coats were afraid of what she had to say.

The only time Frank ever saw Three’s mouth was when he witnessed mealtimes – through the safety of the CCTV camera, of course. The gag would be removed, and Three would turn her bloody smile on the camera, dazzling and beatific, before carefully eating her meal. Beneath the blood, and the wild look in her eyes, she looked kind, almost gentle. A glimpse of what could have been, had she not been muzzled like a vicious dog.

Test Subject Four gave Frank the creeps. Mostly because he couldn’t work out what exactly his power was, or even if he had one. To him, the guy looked just like some poor schizophrenic who had wandered into the wrong facility. He had sad eyes and scars on his arms from where he’d scratched his skin raw. The lab coats had quickly realised that the only way to stop him from tearing at his skin was to strap him into a straitjacket, so that only his darting eyes betrayed his mania.

The others had a fixation with the CCTV cameras. Frank supposed it was logical, it was their only connection to other people when they were in those plain white cells. Four never looked at the camera, never looked at him. He was too preoccupied with staring in terror at something else in his cell, something only he could see. 

Frank watched him thrash about in his narrow bed whenever he managed to get some sleep. But mostly he watched him huddle in the corner, flinching away from something unseen, eyes screwed shut. Four was never restful; there was always something terrorising him. Frank wondered if the same would be true if the lab coats never got their hands on him.

The most unsettling thing about Four was when he _wasn’t_ manic. He was most terrifying when he was still. Frank would watch him talk, seemingly to no one, and then sometimes, deep into the witching hour, Frank would see shadows moving across the camera in Four’s cell. On those nights he would glance behind himself nervously. Unshakable Frank Newman, spooked by some skinny guy with haunted eyes.

There’d been some kind of accident with Test Subject Five, about five years after Frank had started working at the facility. When he’d first seen him, he’d been a young man, lanky and sharp-featured. Then, he hadn’t seen him for a while. For maybe a year or two, there had been no sign, and Frank thought that the Miracle 7 were now down to the Miracle 6.

Then he’d come back. He was dumped back in his cell like nothing had happened. Only he looked like a child again. Frank didn’t ask about it, it was yet another thing no one spoke about. The lab coats seemed excited; they renewed their testing on Five with a vigour Frank hadn’t seen in them before.

The boy was clever, Frank knew that just by looking at him. He held himself with the arrogant confidence of someone who knew he was better than everyone around him. The lab coats didn’t like it, of course; anything that challenged their dominance was to be broken accordingly. 

Whatever they did to him in the lab, he would stumble back into his cell, exhausted and ashen-faced, but when he rolled over on his bed to look up at the camera, he would be smirking. During the night he would write on his walls, thousands of equations like some kind of beautiful mind type. His cell would be searched every morning, but they could never find the pen he was using. His walls would be painted whilst he was being tested. And every night, he would write on them again. 

When Frank had been a kid, he’d loved monster movies, Godzilla, Creature from the Black Lagoon, you name it. That’s why Test Subject Six was his favourite. He appealed to the little kid in Frank who saw those monstrous tentacles and got that terrified thrill he’d been missing since he became an adult and witnessed things far less thrilling, and far more horrifying, in a foreign desert.

The part of him that wasn’t still a little kid, though, saw the look in Six’s eyes and recognised it from those men who couldn’t wash the blood from their hands, no matter how hard and long they scrubbed and scrubbed at their skin. Six was very much like Four in that he was always afraid, but that fear was of something within him, something over which he had just enough control to feel guilty for its actions.

Six always returned to his cell with his hair damp, fresh from the shower. Frank could make a pretty educated guess at what he was washing off. He would sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the wall for hours on end. He would stay very still, like he was afraid the monster would just spill out of him if he moved.

Because Frank was watching, Frank knew that Six had tried to kill himself more than once. He had even raised the alarm on one occasion. Not that it mattered. No matter what way Six had construed to end his own life, the monsters wouldn’t let him. They’d put a stop to it before even the lab coats or security personnel could, taking that last sliver of power over the situation away from the body that housed them. Six continued to live, but even through the camera, Frank saw the growing emptiness in his eyes.

Of all the subjects, Frank paid attention to Test Subject Seven the least. The lab coats spent the most time with her, but either their experiments were silent or they had sound-proofed the room, because he never heard a peep from them. He couldn’t work out what was special about her.

She was quiet and calm, slept soundly, curled up on her side for eight hours every night. In the mornings she would sit on the end of her bed with her hands clasped in her lap and wait for the lab coats to come and collect her. Then she would follow them obediently down the corridor. She would look up at the camera occasionally, with perhaps a glimmer of curiosity, but other than that she kept to herself.

If Frank ever tried to get inside her head, to spend more than a few minutes watching her, he would inevitably find his gaze dragged away to one of the others. Maybe that was her power, the power of insignificance. She would make a good spy, he thought idly, no one would look twice at this bland, mousey little girl.

Perhaps that was why it took him so long to notice something was amiss. If Seven’s power was insignificance then he could hardly be blamed for paying more attention to her more vibrant peers. He had seen her stood in the middle of her cell, her gaze lowered, and thought nothing of it. 

It was only when he heard a distant rumbling that he cast a glance at the camera view of her cell, and saw that the picture was filled with static. He caught a glimpse of the whites of her eyes before the screen went dark.

Standing, he glanced at the camera feeds from the other cells, saw the other test subjects getting to their feet, looking around in wide-eyed curiosity, tilting their heads to listen to the growing ruckus outside.

With a sudden jolt of adrenaline, Frank pulled his gun from its holster, feeling the floor beneath him vibrate with tremors, like there was some kind of earthquake. He left the surveillance room and sprinted down the corridor, in the direction of the cells.

The building was beginning to shake with force, now. Frank could hear the crumbling of plaster somewhere ahead of him.

When he reached the cellblock, there was dust in the air. Squinting, he cocked his gun and started to approach cautiously.

He could make her out ahead. Mousey little Test Subject Seven stood like a wrathful angel at the end of the corridor. The walls of her own cell had been obliterated, and before his eyes, he watched as a wave of power crashed outwards from her, cracking the concrete walls of the other cells.

The walls crumbled, sending white dust up into the air. It seemed to shine ethereally in the moonlight that was now flooding the cell block. Frank stood transfixed, gun forgotten in his hand as he watched the other six rise up from their cells, blinking and uncertain, as they took in the sight of each other. The sight of freedom.

Then, almost as one, their gazes turned on Frank, and Frank realised with terrifying certainty that he wouldn’t stand a chance against one on their own, let alone all seven at once.

Slowly, he lowered his gun and dropped it to the ground. Taking a step forward, he held up his hands and sank to his knees. He was at the mercy of seven creatures who had never been shown an ounce of it themselves, who had never learned humanity because they had been kept apart from it.

Frank would be ripped limb from limb, a sacrificial lamb to atone for the sins of everyone at the facility, everyone who had hurt them, and contributed to their misery.

He closed his eyes, and waited for death.

It never came. Frank cracked an eye open, and to his surprise, found that the test subjects had gravitated towards each other. They clung onto each other’s arms, glancing between themselves with looks of open curiosity and hope on their dusty faces.

The light emanating from Seven seemed to dim, and her eyes lost their inhuman whiteness. The others reached out to her, supporting her before she fell. 

Their saviour. 

Then, with fearful glances back at Frank, the group began to make their stumbling way across the debris of the demolished cell block, away from him, towards the open air, and freedom.

Frank knelt in the ruins of facility, and realised he should have known. His years of watching these kids had told him that no matter what horrors the lab coats put them through, the desperation for love that burned inside each of them was far, far more powerful. 

The seven figures disappeared into the night, completely alone in the world, but clinging to each other.

**Author's Note:**

> If you've got this far, thank you! Please drop me a kudos or a comment as I'm sure it will make my head feel better.


End file.
